Twitter Is (Shockingly) White and Male Like the Rest

In more tech companies are full of white guys news, Twitter says they have a lot of work to do when it comes to employee diversity.

Twitter follows other major players in releasing their first ever diversity report, which shows that overall, they are a company dominated by white men – especially in their leadership circles.

“We are keenly aware that Twitter is part of an industry that is marked by dramatic imbalances in diversity — and we are no exception,” says the company. “It makes good business sense that Twitter employees are representative of the vast and varied backgrounds of our users around the world. We also know that it makes good business sense to be more diverse as a workforce – research shows that more diverse teams make better decisions, and companies with women in leadership roles produce better financial results. But we want to be more than a good business; we want to be a business that we are proud of. To that end, we are joining some peer companies by sharing our ethnic and gender diversity data. And like our peers, we have a lot of work to do.”

Just how much work? Well, quite a bit. Overall, Twitter is 70 percent male. If you look at purely tech roles, Twitter is 90 percent male. Looking at leadership positions, Twitter clocks in at 79 percent male.

For comparison, this puts Twitter on par with Google, a little worse than Facebook, and a significant amount less diverse than Yahoo (who isn’t all that diverse).

When it comes to ethnicity, Twitter is overall 59 percent White, 29 percent Asian, and negligible percentages Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, and American Indian. In terms of leadership, Twitter is 72 percent White.

While unsurprising, this sudden display of transparency from these major tech companies can’t be a bad thing. At least it gets the conversation rolling.

All these companies are shockingly Asian actually. Twitter is 59% white? the U.S. is 64% white meaning whites are actually underrepresented at twitter. only 5% of Americans are Asian yet 29% at twitter? You would think tech companies would be a little better at math

ologbo

Who cares! If only whites deserve the leadership role based on their involvement from day one, then let them have it. Just treat others with fairness.

Yves

I was pointing out the subtle implication that “more diversity” = “less white people” even when white people are already underrepresented.